What we are all here for

(First off: I'm sorry for my lack of posting. The program in Italy is now over, but I will still be posting about it. We had class basically from 8:30 in the morning until 7:00 at night, with rather limited internet access in between. So forgive me and stick with me :))

Paper. That's what we're all here for. Old paper. Really really old paper.

As I introduced in my first post, our teacher's name was Konstantinos Choulis. Konstantinos is

currently an assistant professor of book and paper conservation at the Technological Educational Institute in Athens. Previously, he worked in the Vatican Library and taught conservation in Italy.

The assistant for the course in Giovanni. He was one of Konstantinos's student's and now works in a conservation lab in Rome.

The course is broken up into two parts - morning lecture and afternoon workshop. In the morning, we have a lecture on restoration theory with both programs (paintings and paper) and then split. In our program's lecture, we discuss various aspects of book and paper conservation. Book and paper conservation could really be separated into two fields, as book conservation involves the binding and other elements. In the class, we won't actually be conserving a book - at least not individually. Collectively, we are conserving a Greek liturgical book, but I'll get to that later. Some of the things we have discuss include:

- a brief history of paper making

- the differences between oriental and western paper making
- sewing systems for books
- the different structures of books

- types of damage

- and lot, lots more.

The afternoon workshops are the funnest part. We actually get to handle and work on documents from the 17th century. One of the most important principles of conservation is to make sure that everything that we do is reversible. [It relieves a little tiny bit of the pressure when working on these documents, as most anything we do can be {or should be able to be} undone]

The first document we worked on was a Greek text called ΜΗΝΟΛΟΓΙΟΝ (Menologion).

The book is the one pictured in the banner of my blog. The book is from the 18th-19th century. It was missing the covers, so the front and back pages were unprotected and therefore pretty damaged, as shown below.

A basic explanation of the structure of a book: every book is made up of signatures, or quires. Each quire is made up of folios. Folios are large sheets of paper, the same height of the book and twice the width. When the folio is folded in half, it produces a bifolium. Each bifolium has 4 sides. Each signature typically has between 3-5 bifoliums, depending on the thinckness of the paper, as well as the type of sewing to some extent. So: If you have a book that has 15 quires and each quire is made up of 4 bifoliums:

15 quires

x 4 bifoliums

60 bifoliums

60 bifoliums

x 4 pages (each bifolium)

240 pages total

Make sense?

Each person in the class got their own bifolium from the book to work on. This was mine:

The above picture shows the various steps of the process. The top left picture (labeled A) is the before picture - the condition of the paper when I started working with it. Photos B and C are during pictures at various stages during the process. Photo D is the after picture - I know it's a little bit hard to see, but you'll notice how flat it is compared to the other pictures. The crescent shaped tear in the lower left corner of the page has been repaired. In photo D, if you look closely you can see that Japanese paper has been added to all the edges to make the edges nice and straight and make the bifolium a rectangle again.

I'll dedicate an entire post on the specifics of what was done, so be looking for that soon!

The completed before-and-after picture.

The cool thing about us all getting our own individual bifoliums to work with was that we each had different damages to deal with. There are three categories of damage - chemical, biological, and mechanical. A book or paper usually doesn't have only one type of damage - there are usually at least two of the three categories of damage evident on the page. So we not only learned through dealing with the damage on our own page, we also learned through watching the other students in the class dealing with their own damage.

Coming up soon:

Fabriano paper mill

The Conservation Process

The San Gemini Documents

...and more!

Ciao, a presto!

Carsulae

Are you ready? We'll begin our trek to the archeological site of Carsulae.

Beginning at Porta Giovanni Battista, head down the hill. When you come to the cross roads, take a right. And start walking. Walk some more. And More. Try to avoid the cars swinging wildly around the hair pin turns while simultaneously trying not to fall off the road on the other side. Criss-cross the street a couple of times to find the best side of the road so that the cars can see you and hopefully not kill you. Balance precariously in the thin shoulder on the side of the road as there are no sidewalks. After you have been walking.... and walking... and walking for a while, you will pass the old San Gemini mineral water bottling plant on your right. The new plant is over the hills to your left. Right after the old plant, take the next right, past the bar, and up the hill. Try not to die from exhaustion, and endure to the end. Finally, at the top of the hill, pass the dogs sleeping in the shade, who may or may not warn of your arrival. One more dirt road, and we are at Carsulae.

Carsulae probably started it's growth around 300 BC. It really started to become a major city around 220 BC, when the Romans built the Via Flaminia through the city. Via Flaminia lead from Rome, over the mountains, to the sea and the city now known as Rimini. During the height of it's glory, Carsulae housed baths, an entertainment complex containing an amphitheater, a large forum, several churchs and temples.

Not too long ago, the site of Carsulae was a public park. People used to come to Carsulae to play soccer and have picnics. Now, there is a small museum at the site and on-going digs.

The current dig at Carsulae is at the site of the ancient baths.

This dig is clearing pits for the construction of a roof to cover the actual baths. The baths and other parts of Carsulae have been excavated several times previously, the most recent time in the 1950s. Unfortunately, those digs were mostly looking for treasure, which would be removed and sold to museums or reused in towns and houses nearby. In fact, some of the houses in San Gemini probably have pieces that were taken from Carsulae.

Much of this dig is going through the dump piles of the previous digs. In digging these pits, the unspoken hope is *not* to find anything, as that would complicate things. To do things

properly, they can't just dig a hole and put concrete in there for the posts. They have to dig through slowly and throughly to make sure that there are no artifacts in the places where the posts are to go.

Most of the pits are

mostly clear. Throughout digging, pieces of pottery, bone, glass and tile are found. These obje

cts are bagged, tagged and cleaned. Every once in a while, a coin is found.

(to the left - a sizeable piece of glass that was found in one of the pits)

In one of the pits however, a large section of ancient wall, with a flue or drain pipe, was found. (unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of this)

Now on to the rest of Carsulae:

The Church of San Damiano was reconstructed using pieces of the ancient site in the 11th century.

Near the church of San Damiano are the remains of two temples, right next to each other and identical in size and shape. It was very unusual during that time period to have more than one temple in a city of that size. These temples are often referred to as the twin temples - the fact that there are two and that they are identical indicates that they were probably dedicated to twin roman deities. These twins are also depicted in the Church of San Damiano.

This picture shows evidence of overpainting - the figure to the left is wearing a different head piece than the figure on the right. This is probably because people came in later and repainted the fresco to fit their belief system.

Our teacher, Max Cardillo, is the project architect for the Carsulae excavations. It was really neat being able to go around the site and hear his unique knowledge about the site. In the picture to the left, he is telling us about how cheap to Romans were. Instead of constructing an entire room or building out of marble, they would often just build it out of stone and then cover the walls with several inches of marble. It had the appearance of marble, and was much less expensive! Win-win!

The picture to the right above is a close-up of the construction techniques of the stone walls. It makes a pretty pattern :)

The picture above is of the Arco di Traiano, the northern gate to the city of Carsulae. There are buildings you can see in the picture, but these buildings would have been outside of the city. We know this because those buildings are funerary moments, and the dead would have been buried outside the gates of the city.

My fellow students in front of the Arco di Traiano

Following are more pictures of around the site of Carsulae:

Ciao, a presto!